New 4th Edition of Elizabeth Shown Mills book Evidence Explained

From the Genealogical Publishing Company (https://genealogical.com):

Announcing the New 4th Edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, by Elizabeth Shown Mills

For today’s family historians, records abound. In courthouses and warehouses, town halls and rectories, archives and attics, we find old records in every form imaginable. Technology also delivers documents and relics through many digital formats. Audio files, podcasts, and YouTube stream insight into past lives. Libraries offer film and fiche, reprints and revisions, and translations and transcripts, alongside digital access to books and journals published previously in print.

However, all records are not created equal, and history is not just a collection of “facts.” Critical analysis is essential, and since 2007 Evidence Explained has been the definitive, go-to guide for those who explore history and seek help with understanding, analyzing, and citing the materials they use.

Evidence Explained has two principal uses: it provides citation models for historical sources—especially materials not covered in standard citation guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style. Beyond that, it enables researchers to understand the nature of each source so that the evidence they cite can be better interpreted and the accuracy of their conclusions properly appraised.

In the six years since the last edition was published, changes at major repositories and online information providers—as well as in the ever-evolving electronic world—have generated new citation and analysis challenges for researchers. As a consequence, Elizabeth Shown Mills has once again updated her citation models and added descriptions and evaluations of numerous contemporary materials not included in the previous edition.

The new Fourth Edition of Evidence Explained significantly re-examines historical resources and simplifies long-standing practices. Highlights of the Fourth Edition include:

• Updated Chapters One and Two (“Fundamentals of Analysis” and “Fundamentals of Citation”) continue to lay the foundations for successful research.
• An entirely new Chapter Three, “Building a Citation,” provides a tutorial for the construction of citations. Here, you learn to work with seven basic building blocks that can be mixed and matched to create a citation for any kind of source.
• Chapter Three’s 14 streamlined templates replace the previous 170 QuickCheck Models, assembling the basic building blocks as needed to create citations for every type of material—whether accessed as an unpublished manuscript, print publication, database, or online image delivered at a specific URL or through a complex path and its waypoints.
• All examples in the twelve “Records” chapters (Chapters Four through Fifteen) are keyed to the specific templates that work best for each source or situation.
• Hundreds of new citation examples emphasize modern modes of access, particularly the layered citations that modern media require.

For further details and to purchase visit https://genealogical.com/store/evidence-explained-4th-edition/

Comment: This is a manual that shows how to create genealogical source citations. Having been trained through the University of Strathclyde's Genealogy programme, we were taught to cite sources using the Harvard referencing style, but I still have Elizabeth's book to hand to offer suggestions in certain circumstances, whilst adopting a slightly different approach within my client reports. The key thing is to understand the needs for, and the discipline behind, genealogical referencing for sources, and Elizabeth's guide is a superb asset to help with that.

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For purchase in tthe USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, on Threads at @scottishgenesblog and via Mastodon at https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGENES.